Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Canada Read online

  Rumor: The 11 points on the flag’s maple leaf symbolize the 10 provinces and Canada.

  True? No

  The story: They also don’t stand for the country’s 11 national holidays, 11 regional phone companies, 11 Ikea stores, the 11 million people residing in its southernmost fifth…or the fact that its total population equals 11 percent of the United States. The leaf on the flag started out with 13 points (no symbolic meaning), and two were lopped off at the last minute because the design looked too “busy.”

  Santa checks his mail.

  Rumor: Santa Claus has his own postal code.

  True? Yes

  The story: Although the North Pole isn’t technically in Canada, Santa drops by to pick up his mail and cash money orders. The best part? His easy-to-remember postal code: H0H 0H0.

  Rumor: The Hudson’s Bay Company’s original royal charter, still in effect, requires it to send an annual shipment of beaver pelts to the queen of England.

  True? No.

  The story: This rumor may have started because, last century, company officials presented furs and decorative mounted animal heads to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II when they visited Canada. On her second visit, in 1970, the queen received live animals which she donated to Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo.

  Rumor: Tim Hortons adds nicotine to its products to make them addictive.

  True? No.

  The story: Almost every mainstream brand gets this sort of rumor attached to it at some point, but this one seems completely unnecessary. The caffeine in coffee and the fat in fast food are already sufficiently addictive.

  North American lemming

  Rumor: In a Disney documentary filmed in Alberta, the filmmakers pushed lemmings off a cliff, creating the myth that lemmings commit mass suicide.

  True? Yes

  The story: Although lemmings aren’t even native to Alberta, that’s where filmmakers created the lemming segment of White Wilderness, a nature documentary from 1958, using animals bought from Inuit children. At the end, the film crew herded the furry little actors to their deaths over a cliff and into the water, filming the “mass suicides.”

  Rumor: During a performance at the North Dakota state fair in July 2006, country star Keith Urban asked Canadians in the audience to stand up. When they did, he ordered them to leave because their country didn’t support America’s foreign policy.

  True? No.

  The story: Here’s what he really said: “I hear we have a lot of Canadians in the audience tonight.” Then he asked them to shout or stand. When they did, he told them, “It’s good to see you.” (And anyway, Urban is Australian.)

  Rumor: A tragic Canadian car accident led to the invention of those “Baby on Board” signs.

  True? No

  The story: The yellow-and-black signs seen everywhere in the 1980s were first created by an unmarried and childless American named Michael Lerner. After a friend brought back a similar sign from Europe, which was simply meant to remind people to drive carefully, Lerner bought the rights to it and created his own sign. Safety 1st, the company he started to market the signs, branched out into an extensive line of products before being bought out by a Canadian competitor, Dorel Industries, in 2000. (Dorel is the only Canadian link in the whole story.)

  Rumor: Smugglers routinely hide drugs in Canadian vehicles parked in the United States, unknown to their innocent owners, and then unload them across the border.

  True? No

  The story: Despite vivid stories that have circulated over the years, border officials consider this to be unlikely…mostly because they believe that no one would be willing to take the risk, effort, and time involved to load a vehicle in a public place, follow it around until its driver decides to head home, keep track of it until it reaches its Canadian destination, and then unload it in the owner’s driveway or garage. There are easier ways to smuggle drugs into Canada.

  Rumor: A watchman for the British Columbia Telephone Company accidentally roasted himself to death when he stood in front of a microwave to get warm.

  True? No

  The story: As long as we live in a time of ever-changing and new technology, we’ll have these sorts of rumors. While long-term and continuous exposure to microwaves may cause health issues, there are no known cases where a telephone-company worker has been cooked by one.

  Grizzly bear

  Rumor: An American parent visiting Algonquin Park in Ontario smeared honey on his child’s face to get a cute picture of a bear licking her face. Instead, the little girl was badly mauled.

  True? No

  The story: Not just Algonquin, but nearly every national park with bears in the United States and Canada has been cited as the site of this horrible occurrence. It never happened.

  Mick Jagger

  Rumor: In 1969 Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and the Beatles secretly got together “in a small town near the original Hudson Bay Colony” and recorded an album under the name the Masked Marauders.

  True? No.

  The story: In 1969 a prank Rolling Stone review of this nonexistent album set off a frenzy of record-buyers trying to find copies. Within a month, the joke got stranger when an unknown group claiming to be the Masked Marauders recorded an album with most of the songs named in the review and sold 100,000 copies. Then in 1976, the Canadian group Klaatu benefited from similar confusion when rumors claimed that they were the reunited Beatles. (They weren’t.)

  Canada’s Five Deadliest Tornados

  1. Regina, Saskatchewan: June 30, 1912 (28 people killed)

  2. Edmonton, Alberta: July 31, 1987 (27 people killed)

  3. Windsor, Ontario: June 17, 1946 (17 people killed)

  4. Pine Lake, Alberta: July 14, 2000 (12 people killed)

  5. Valleyfield, Quebec: August 16, 1888 (9 people killed)

  Putting the Punk in Punctuality

  The bank-robbing Stopwatch Gang—Patrick “Paddy” Mitchell, Stephen Reid, and Lionel Wright—were famous for their politeness, planning, and punctuality. Such nice boys…it’s no surprise that they were Canadian.

  Stephen Reid in 2008

  First Glance

  The Stopwatch Gang didn’t ask for attention. In fact, they didn’t even come up with their name—it was given to them because one of their best robbery tools was a stopwatch hung around the neck of master planner Stephen Reid. During the 1970s and 1980s, they were credited with about 100 bank robberies (although Paddy Mitchell later swore he could remember only 47), including one that netted $283,000 in San Diego, a California record. Their methodical effectiveness quickly put them on the FBI’s most-wanted list in the United States.

  Paddy Mitchell began his life of crime in Ottawa in a low-key manner: fencing goods that other people had taken the risk of stealing. Then, in 1974, he got a tip about a shipment of gold bars being transported through the Ottawa airport to the Royal Canadian Mint and decided he’d like a more active part in the acquisitions branch of his business.

  Mitchell recruited two calm, confident, intelligent, and methodical men to join him in stealing those bars: Stephen Reid, a great planner, and Lionel Wright, a great executer. Their goals were threefold: get the bars, do not hurt anybody if possible, and make a clean escape. Reid explained all of those things were best accomplished by precise timing so that nobody wasted time standing around, wondering what to do next. His idea was to swoop in, take the goods, and be out the door within 90 seconds. He carried a stopwatch with him to call out the seconds if things started to go off schedule.

  In 1974 the gang re-routed thousands of dollars in gold bars away from the Canadian Mint.

  Leaving on a Jet Plane

  The gang knew what they didn’t want to do: go into the airport with guns blazing. They needed a clever plan that required no confrontation with guards at all. A local thief Mitchell knew also worked at the airport, and Mitchell convinced him to help.

  On the day of the heist, the inside man left a door open in the airport warehouse, and the trio slipped in. The
y surprised the guard in front of the secure room where the gold bars were being held, put a hood over his head, and handcuffed him to a steel railing. The clock was ticking, and the men had no idea how long it would be before someone stumbled onto the trussed-up guard.

  They also knew they’d attract attention if they pushed a heavy cart out of the airport terminal. So instead of escaping with the stolen gold, they quickly pasted new address stickers onto the boxes and dropped the packages into Air Canada’s cargo area. Within 90 seconds, the trio sauntered away in different directions. By the time authorities discovered the guard and figured out the gold was missing, the robbers were long gone, and the gold bars had been loaded into an Air Canada plane, heading for Windsor, where the gang would retrieve them.

  The Taste of Money

  There’s nothing like an audacious plan and a big score to whet a thief’s appetite. It was time to try out their 90-second plan on banks. Reid worked out every possible detail of the robberies in advance to be prepared for all contingencies. The gang’s strategy was to burst in and take control of a bank before anybody could do anything stupid. In places too close to a police station for comfort, Reid discovered that calling in a bomb threat to an address across town drew most of the cops away and minimized the risk.

  Reid even scripted the gang’s posture and words carefully so as to instill fear but not cause panic. He discovered phrases like, “Reach for the sky,”“This won’t take long, folks,” and “Stay where you are and nobody gets hurt” were effective. He also learned quickly to stay on script after one time he erred and ad-libbed—“Okay folks, imitate your favorite statue!”—and an elderly woman walked over and asked him to repeat what he’d said.

  Crime Pays…for a While

  In all, the Stopwatch Gang made off with about $15 million, hitting up to 100 banks in Canada and the United States. Their biggest day was in 1980 in San Diego. They broke California’s record for the single biggest take and came away with $293,000. According to Paddy Mitchell, the greatest thrill in the world is “being back at the apartment after a successful job and counting the money.”

  And like Wild West outlaws, the Stopwatch Gang holed up in a hideaway in the Arizona mountains. Unlike most hideouts, however, this one was luxurious, built of cedar with wide expanses of glass, and surrounded by an active local community.

  The trio made friends with the locals. Reid and his girlfriend sometimes even played cards with the sheriff and his wife. The men explained their long intervals away from home by telling their neighbors they were concert promoters.

  Paddy Mitchell, at the time of his arrest

  The Stopwatch Gang’s main hideaway was here in Arizona’s Oak Creek Canyon.

  Kinder, Gentler Bad Guys

  The Stopwatch Gang may have waved around a gun or two in the course of their work, but they certainly weren’t trigger-happy. In fact, they never shot anyone. They were known for being matter-of-fact about the task at hand, calm, and usually downright polite. “Our number-one rule was: nobody gets hurt,” Paddy Mitchell wrote in June 2000 in a series of articles for the Ottawa Citizen. Eventually, their luck ran out, and all of them were arrested. That didn’t stop their exploits, though. In the 1980s, Reid and Wright escaped from separate prisons and together showed up with a phony ambulance to take Mitchell away from his after he faked a heart attack.

  Another time, Mitchell wiggled to freedom through air-conditioning ducts. But the men were always caught, and they all ended up back in prison for long stretches. Reid and Mitchell used some of the time to write books about their criminal lives.

  Reid married Canadian poet Susan Musgrave and went straight for a little while but fell off the wagon; in 1999, he went back to prison for robbing a bank in Victoria. Mitchell died of lung cancer in 2007 while serving a 30-year sentence in North Carolina.

  Loony Laws

  Rotting fish, manhandling a mango, and measuring garbage: these are just some of the subjects covered by Canadian jurisprudence.

  •Your money or your rights: It’s illegal everywhere in Canada to pay for something with just pennies if the total is more than 25¢. You can’t pay with only nickels for something over $5, or in all dimes if the cost is more than $10.

  •Sure, you can fish in some of the lakes and streams of Canada’s national parks, but if your catch rots, you’ve broken the law.

  Technically, Canadian comic books are banned from depicting crimes.

  •Check in your old childhood closet: it’s illegal to own any comic book that “exclusively or substantially” depicts crimes—real or fictitious.

  •You can’t “manhandle” fresh produce in British Columbia until after you’ve paid for it.

  •Engaging in a duel is not specifically against the law in Canada. However, challenging someone to a duel, inciting another to challenge someone, or accepting a challenge is definitely breaking the law.

  •You’ll need a measuring stick to take out the garbage in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Your trash must go out in a bag measuring at least 66 x 91 centimeters (26 x 35 inches), with a carrying capacity of 25 to 90 liters (6 to 23 gallons).

  •Keep ’em in the backyard where they belong: Toronto forbids any crocodile or alligator, no matter how small or large, to be in private homes.

  •Got a wound? Don’t consider changing your bandage in public or it’ll cost you a pretty penny (literally—the maximum fine is 1¢).

  •See all those glossy ads for Viagra? An old Canadian law says you can be prosecuted if you advertise a product that enhances or improves sexual performance. There’s a big loophole, however: you can skirt the law if you can prove that “the public good was served” by the advertisement.

  You Stole What?

  •Over the course of several years, someone stole ideas for computer technology from Jerry Rose of Nanaimo, British Columbia. The thief stole it directly from his brain, using “invasive brain computer interface technology, research experiments, field studies, and surgery.” At least that’s what Rose claimed in 2008 when he sued the University of British Columbia, the RCMP, Microsoft, Google, Telus, Wal-Mart, the Great Canadian Casino, and several others, seeking $2 billion in damages. (He lost.)

  •In 2007 Bert Cooper, 78, was in his backyard on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, when he noticed something strange: someone had stolen the bark off of his birch trees. On closer inspection, he found that about 120 of the trees had about a meter (three feet) of bark missing. “It was so disgusting,” he told the CBC. Police said birch-bark thefts were on the rise, adding that the wood was likely being sold for use in arts and crafts.

  •In 2004 someone stole a 460-pound pink concrete pig from the front yard of Winnipeg Blue Bombers president Lyle Bauer. The pig was the mascot of the Canadian Football League team. The Bombers are still looking for the culprit. Said team official David Asper, “We will never let the terrorists win.

  Truth, Justice, and a Canadian… Eh?

  A 1930s Action Comic book features Superman and his super-strength on its cover.

  He’s billed as an American hero, but Superman has more Canadian connections than you can shake a maple leaf at.

  •Toronto-born Joe Schuster, artist and co-creator of Superman, lived there until his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929, when he was 10. The fictional town of Metropolis was modeled on Toronto.

  •Schuster got interested in comics because his dad read him the funny pages from the Toronto Star. When Schuster first drew his Superman comic, he named Clark Kent’s newspaper the Metropolis Daily Star in tribute, but an editor at DC Comics made him change it to the Daily Planet.

  •Superman’s secret Fortress of Solitude is under the ice at the North Pole. Canada has put in a claim that the North Pole is Canadian, so Superman may be a resident…whether legally or illegally.

  •Smallville, the TV show based on the life of young Clark Kent, was filmed mostly in and around Vancouver, the city that doubled for Metropolis. Smallville’s Main Street was made up of locations in Merritt
and Cloverdale, B.C.; a farm in Aldergrove was used as the Kents’ farm; and Victoria’s Hatley Castle acted as Lex Luthor’s home.

  •Many of the show’s interiors were filmed at the Burnaby BB Studios.

  •Scenes from the Superman movies were filmed at Alberta locations, including Barons (Clark Kent’s grade school) and High River (Lana Lang’s house and most of Smallville, including its town square).

  •Joe Schuster was not only Canadian—his cousin was Frank Schuster of the comedy team Wayne and Schuster.

  The Last Spike

  The Canada Pacific Railroad’s “Last Spike” ceremony was supposed to feature pomp, the governor-general, and a silver spike…but it didn’t quite work out that way.

  A Canada Pacific Railroad freight train moves along the Bow River through the Canadian Rockies.

  Have You Seen Our Silver Spike?

  On November 7, 1885, in Craigellachie, British Columbia, railroad financier Donald Alexander Smith pounded in the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), linking eastern and western Canada. The project was finally finished more than four years behind schedule. Still, all were smiling when Smith drove in the last spike. But one man and one important prop were missing from the occasion: Canada’s governor-general, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, had arrived months earlier from Ottawa with a ceremonial silver spike, but when he got to B.C. there was still a 45-kilometer (28-mile) gap between the eastern and western tracks. Disappointed and a little angry, he took his silver spike and went home.